Egypt Busy Planting Resistant Wheat Strains As Stem Rust Approaches From North - Reuters

[hatrack]

CAIRO - Egypt, the world's top wheat importer, is introducing new wheat varieties resistant to a mutant form of stem rust, an airborne fungus with the ability to annihilate entire crops. "We have already started using these seeds and 40 tonnes are now being planted in the Nile Delta," Ayman Abouhadid, president of the country's Agricultural Research Center, told Reuters in an interview.

The fungus, which has plagued wheat since biblical times, was largely controlled in the 1950s when scientists passed out seeds with a gene to block the disease. But a destructive new strain reappeared in Uganda in the late 1990s, once more posing a potentially serious threat to 80 percent of the world's wheat supplies.

Experts have said the only way to overcome the new fungus would be to replace the bulk of the world's commercial wheat with new seeds bred to fight it. Egypt, which cultivates around 3 million feddans (1.26 million hectares) of wheat per year, has reacted fast in developing the new strains.

"We have two wheat varieties, Misr 1 and Misr 2, which we developed and are resistant to this new form of stem rust," Abouhadid said. The new stem rust, termed Ug99, has travelled from Uganda to Kenya, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Yemen and subsequently went on to affect crops as far away as Iran and Afghanistan in less than a decade.

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http://planetark.org/enviro-news/item/56126